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South Africa's legally binding National Water Resource Strategy specifies a people-oriented prioritization for the equitable allocation of the nation's public trust of surface and groundwater resources. This article analyses how the Inkomati–Usuthu Catchment Management Agency seeks to operationalize the three highest priorities in the Sabie Sub Catchment: the Basic Human Needs Reserve for domestic and constitutionally based productive water uses; customary water tenure in former homelands prioritized over the upstream commercial forestry and large-scale farming and the downstream Kruger National Park; and priority General Authorizations overcoming administrative injustices of current licensing. These highest priorities imply curtailment of the lowest priority, high-impact economic uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During apartheid, South Africa formalized legal pluralism as territorial and institutional segregation that legitimized the white minority's grab of most land, water and mineral resources. In the homelands on the remaining 13% of the country, allied tribal chiefs controlled second-class customary land and water rights. Under the democratic dispensation, the new Constitution (1996) and National Water Act (1998) aim at redressing this racial discrimination. However, these goals have not been achieved. Building on literature, field research and ongoing policy and legal debates, this paper traces causes for this failure and examines whether and how a different interpretation of statutory law can decolonize past legal pluralism. A main cause of this failure is the continued power by white large-scale water users and their consultants and lawyers. Monopolizing technical and legal knowledge, they fiercely defend apartheid era's Existing Lawful Uses by 1998 and relatively easily obtain administrative licences for post-1998 water uptake, while claiming excessive monetary values of entitlements to water resources that the state, with tax payers, as custodian holds. In contrast, black water users' pre-1998 Existing Lawful Uses have not been defined as yet and burdensome licences processes for new water uptake are inaccessible to the many smaller-scale black water users. The paper concludes that, in former homelands, the legal status of living customary water tenure should be elevated and protected. Inclusive facilitated processes can further clarify the "sharing in" of water resources flowing over or under the communities' territories inside the boundaries of former homelands, also to enable gradual alignment with constitutional rights. However, in "sharing out" these water resources with powerful third parties, including foreign investors, customary water tenure should be fully protected. As a core minimum of highest priority water resource rights across the country, the current Basic Human Needs Reserve should include all water-related constitutional rights, so also water for sufficient food, and be implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the rapid extension of public service delivery since the end of Apartheid, many rural citizens in South Africa still rely on their own initiatives and infrastructure to access water. They construct, improve, operate and maintain infrastructure of different complexities, from individual wells to complex collectively owned water schemes. While most of these schemes operate without legal recognition, they provide essential services to many households. In this article we will first provide an overview of the growing international body of literature describing self-supply as an alternative pathway for public service delivery. We then take a historical perspective on the role of communities and self-supply in South Africa and describe the emergence of six collectively owned, gravity-fed, piped schemes in Tshakhuma, Limpopo Province. We describe and compare these systems using key characteristics like resource access, investment, construction, operation, maintenance and institutional governance. We further assess their performance with regard to coverage, service level, reliability, governance structure, accountability and water quality. We do so because we are convinced that lessons learned from studying such schemes as locally adapted prototypes have the potential to improve public approaches to service delivery. The described cases show the willingness of community members to engage with service delivery and their ability to provide services in cases where the state has failed. The assessment also highlights problematic aspects of self-supply related to a lack of accountability, technical expertise and the exclusion of disadvantaged community members. By describing and assessing the performance of rural self-supply schemes, we aim to recognize, study and learn from such schemes. We consequently do not conclude this article by providing answers, but by raising some pertinent, policy-relevant questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study fills a knowledge gap about low-income rural communities' holistic management of multiple water resources to meet their multiple needs through multiple- or single-use infrastructure. Six low-income rural villages in Limpopo Province were selected with a diversity in: service levels, surface and groundwater resources, public infrastructure (designed for either domestic uses or irrigation but multiple use in reality) and self-supply (people's individual or communal investments in infrastructure). Focusing on water-dependent livelihoods and water provision to homesteads, distant fields and other sites of use, three policy-relevant patterns were identified. First, most households have two or more sources of water to their homesteads as a vital buffer to irregular supplies and droughts. Second, infrastructure to homesteads is normally for domestic uses, livestock and, for many households, irrigation for consumption and sale. Public infrastructure to irrigate distant fields is multiple use. Exceptionally, self-supply point sources to distant fields are single use. Water bodies to other sites of use are normally multiple use. As for large-scale infrastructure, multiple-use infrastructure is cost-effective and water-efficient. Third, in four of the six villages people's self-supply is a more important water source to homesteads than public infrastructure. In all villages, water provided through self-supply is shared. Self-supply improves access to water faster, more cost-effectively and more sustainably than public services do. In line with international debates, self-supply is there to stay and can be supported as a cost-effective and sustainable complementary mode of service delivery. A last potential policy implication regards community-driven planning, design and construction of water infrastructure according to people's priorities. This may sustainably harness the above-mentioned advantages and, moreover, communities' ability to manage complex multiple sources, uses and multiple-use infrastructure, whether public or selfsupply, as a matter of daily life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joint Venture schemes based on the floppy irrigation technology are being promoted in the post-Apartheid South Africa's Limpopo Province. Access to land and water resources in South Africa are largely viewed as a mechanism for re-dressing the Apartheid injustices. This research was part of a broader applied research to help inform irrigation practise in the Limpopo Province. The research used literature review, key informant interviews and a questionnaire survey. The overall research question sought to understand how the Joint Venture Schemes had benefited the smallholder farmers. This paper argues that the joint venture partnership created a new injustice. Firstly, the Joint Venture Scheme design is fundamentally a bad idea which disempower farmers not only to water access but also land as well. The choice of the ‘efficient’ floppy irrigation technology was made by the state and entailed that land had to be managed as a single unit. In order to make more effective use of this highly sophisticated new technology, the smallholder farmers also needed to go into a joint venture partnership with a white commercial farmer. By virtue of signing the Joint Venture agreement the farmers were also forfeiting their land and water rights to be used for crop production. The smallholder farmers lost access to their water and land resources and were largely relegated to sharing profits – when they exist - with hardly any skills development despite what was initially envisaged in the Joint Venture partnership. Secondly, the implementation of the JVS has been skewed from the start which explains the bad results. This paper further shows how the negative outcomes affected women in particular. As the smallholder farmers argue the technological options chosen by the state have excluded both male and female farmers from accessing and utilising their land and water resources in order to improve their livelihoods; it has entrenched the role of the state and the private interests at the expense of the smallholder male and female farmers in whose name the irrigation funding was justified. The paper concludes by offering recommendations on how joint venture schemes can be genuinely participatory and meaningfully address the rural livelihoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights engenders important state commitments to respect, fulfill, and protect a broad range of socio-economic rights. In 2010, a milestone was reached when the UN General Assembly recognized the human right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation. However, water plays an important role in realizing other human rights such as the right to food and livelihoods, and in realizing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. These broader water-related rights have been recognized but have not yet been operationalized. This paper unravels these broader water-related rights in a more holistic interpretation of existing international human rights law. By focusing on an emerging approach to water services provision-known as 'domestic-plus' services-the paper argues how this approach operationalizes a comprehensive range of socio-economic rights in rural and peri-urban areas. Domestic-plus services provide water for domestic and productive uses around homesteads, which challenges the widespread practice in the public sector of planning and designing water infrastructure for a single-use. Evidence is presented to show that people in rural communities are already using their water supplies planned for domestic uses to support a wide range of productive activities. Domestic-plus services recognize and plan for these multiple-uses, while respecting the priority for clean and safe drinking water. The paper concludes that domestic-plus services operationalize the obligation to progressively fulfill a comprehensive range of indivisible socio-economic rights in rural and peri-urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple-use water services (MUS) have been promoted and piloted globally for two decades as a socio-technical innovation. Yet the MUS approach has hardly extended beyond donor-funded projects to public policies. We use a collective action framework to analyze the non-institutionalization of MUS in Nepal. We find that MUS has much cognitive legitimacy, but discourse fragmentation has reduced its socio-political legitimacy. Yet the latter is essential to overcome the institutional challenges of a fragmented public water sector and to mainstream MUS into policy debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wastewater is increasingly regarded as a valuable resource, but to fully and safely exploit the potential, sound institutional arrangements governing its reuse are crucial. This article presents a case study of a self-managed irrigation scheme in Western Cape, South Africa, that uses treated effluent directly, formally and safely. By applying the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, the variables within the context, action arena and patterns of interaction that have enabled this outcome are systematically identified and evaluated. Key variables include: water scarcity; an effective policy and regulatory framework; public pollution prevention awareness; self-organization; and capital-intensive water use linked to profitable markets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Globally, many populations face structural and environmental barriers to access safe water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services. Among these populations are many of the 200 million pastoralists whose livelihood patterns and extreme environmental settings challenge conventional WASH programming approaches. In this paper, we studied the Afar pastoralists in Ethiopia to identify WASH interventions that can mostly alleviate public health risks, within the population's structural and environmental living constraints. Surveys were carried out with 148 individuals and observational assessments made in 12 households as part of a Pastoralist Community WASH Risk Assessment. The results show that low levels of access to infrastructure are further compounded by risky behaviours related to water containment, storage and transportation. Additional behavioural risk factors were identified related to sanitation, hygiene and animal husbandry. The Pastoralist Community WASH Risk Assessment visually interprets the seriousness of the risks against the difficulty of addressing the problem. The assessment recommends interventions on household behaviours, environmental cleanliness, water storage, treatment and hand hygiene via small-scale educational interventions. The framework provides an approach for assessing risks in other marginal populations that are poorly understood and served through conventional approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]